


helios, his modern muse

by divinemistake



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Artist Steve Rogers, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Domestic Bliss, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Insecurity, Plus-Sized Reader, Reader-Insert, Sculpture, Weight Issues, nameless reader - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:02:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29422752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/divinemistake/pseuds/divinemistake
Summary: You prefer the version of him that you can keep inside your tiny apartment, the Steve who looks beautiful in a blue button-up and slightly wrinkled khakis, what he’s wearing now. The Steve who has dried clay beneath his nails sometimes, the one who sculpts and molds objects of beauty from nothing, who makes art out of ugly things.Sometimes, you think it’s why he chose you out of everyone—his need to make art from something ugly.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Reader
Comments: 9
Kudos: 61





	helios, his modern muse

**Author's Note:**

> This is a tumblr request for someone who wanted a sculptor Steve and a plus-sized reader. Please enjoy!

If Steve is the sun, then you would give up everything to be his moon.

“Hey, sweetheart.” His eyes are fire when he looks at you and you wonder if you could touch the sky, the same blue of his eyes, would it feel as warm as the way his gaze does? “How was work?”

He’s sitting at your kitchen table, looking like a god among the stained wood and rickety chairs. A newspaper—so old-fashioned he is, you’ve tried to teach him he can read the news on his phone but he always insists it’s better from the paper—is spread across his lap, thumbing through the pages, a glass of water sitting within reach. Your tiny New York apartment, kitchen tiled green and ugly, looks so small when he resides there. Like his body takes up space and his aura, his being, the light he projects even when he’s just sitting there doing _nothing_ at all, swallows up the atmosphere inside.

If Steve Rogers is the sun, then god, you only shine in the light he radiates.

“Exhausting,” you reply, throwing your keys into the catch-all bowl in the entryway and kicking off your heels. A bath, a blanket, and a bottle of wine are calling your name, but Steve does this incredible thing where the moment he sees you, he opens his arms up like the gates of Heaven and you have no choice but to slump into his embrace.

He does that now, too. With a shuffle of his paper, where he folds it and places it on the dining table, he stands up from the wobbling chair and takes a step toward you, opening his arms wide and smiling with that boyish grin that gets you every time. And like always, you’re stuck in his orbit and unable to resist him, throwing yourself into his hold and relaxing against him.

Your bodies press and mold like magnets forced together. Steve’s arms slip around the smallest part of your waist, squeezing you, his hands roaming over the generous curves and dips that make up your body. Your own arms twine around the back of his neck and you hang from him, letting him support your weight, and on another day if you were less tired and more aware, you’d feel embarrassed at this whole thing.

It’s just simple math, most of the time. If Steve is the sun and you’re still heavier than him, then what are you?

But Steve never makes you feel like that and you love that about him. He holds you like you’re weightless, like you’re this stretch of empty space he needs to cling to before it disappears. Steve drinks you in like you’re oxygen, nothing but gas, a method of sustaining him. And more than anything, he looks at you as if he isn’t the fucking sun, all twenty-seven-million-degrees of him, like he isn’t the star that everyone else revolves around, his warmth, his smile, his blinding light.

No, Steve looks at you like you’re his sun, and sometimes, like now, it steals every ounce of heat from your soul and leaves you frozen.

He must feel you stiffen in his embrace because he ducks down to kiss you then, pulling you impossibly closer, nudging under your jaw with his nose to make you tip upward to reach his lips. You respond like it’s second nature, your mouth moving with his in a dance you’ve choreographed over the last year, and when his tongue smooths over yours like velvet, it ignites a flame in the dredges of your stomach that turns you messy and frantic. Steve laughs against your lips as if he doesn’t know whether to give into your demands so easily, but you know, eventually, he will.

This time, he pulls away, resting his forehead against yours, and your eyes flutter shut as you breathe him in. He smells like earth, bergamot and clay, something fresh that you can’t name as you still the excitement in your heart. It’s a preferable smell to when he comes home from missions, tang and copper and smoke and death. You prefer the version of him that you can keep inside your tiny apartment, the Steve who looks beautiful in a blue button-up and slightly wrinkled khakis, what he’s wearing now. The Steve who has dried clay beneath his nails sometimes, the one who sculpts and molds objects of beauty from nothing, who makes art out of ugly things.

Sometimes, you think it’s why he chose you out of everyone—his need to make art from something ugly.

When your eyes open again, his are closed as he drinks in your effervescence, like he needs your presence to survive. Like you’ve been gone for so long he can’t stand it and needs to bask in your body once again. Behind him, and you’re not sure how you didn’t notice it before, his newest project is left drying, old newspapers he swears he only keeps around for art sitting beneath it to protect your rented floors.

It’s something new, you realize. Something Steve hasn’t attempted to sculpt before. When he first decided he wanted to move on from painting to clay sculptures, he started off small. Oven-baked clay he turned into plates and bowls and lop-sided cups. Things he could paint afterward, combining his talents, something that always brought this look of pride and satisfaction to his face, especially when you cooed over how beautiful his pieces were. He made little statues he gave to his friends, too, an angel’s wing for Sam and a white wolf for Bucky—which took him so long because he had to get it perfect and _sweetheart, animals are so hard to make, but I gotta do it for Buck_.

This though, this thing that’s sitting, drying, in your kitchen, is a body. And it’s silly, really, but it’s a woman’s body, with her breasts shaped perfectly and her stomach taut, her hips flared into a base. Her neck is slim and her shoulders are smooth, held confidently.

It’s a woman’s body and it isn’t you. It could never be you. You’re too wide, too inelegant, too round in the areas that are so so flat. Steve makes beautiful art out of ugly things. You remind yourself of this so you are painfully aware that Steve could never sculpt you. He would never sculpt you. His need isn’t to make art of you, but to make art out of you.

Steve never makes you feel like that. He never makes you feel ugly.

You’re plenty good at doing that yourself.

“Do you like it?” His voice interrupts your descent into self-pity. He must have realized you’d been staring at it.

“It’s beautiful,” you murmur, and it’s the truth, it really is beautiful, but it feels like a lie to say it out loud.

Steve scratches the back of his head and you miss the warmth of his hand on your waist. It feels like a rejection. 

“Yeah,” he says, drawing his hands through his golden hair. “Natasha, uh, well, she wanted something like it. It’s not her,” he quickly assures you, eyes finding yours again. “She didn’t model or anything. It’s just a symbol of feminism, inner goddess, or something like that. Her words, anyway.”

He’s nervous. You don’t know why.

“She’ll love it,” you tell him, your hand smoothing down the wrinkles of his shirt over his chest. It seems to calm him, a happy sigh leaving his mouth. “It’s a powerful statement for her. I think she forgets that her body can hold beauty, not just power and strength.”

You lean up to press a kiss to his lips, a reassurance. Are you trying to reassure him or reassure yourself?

His hold around you tightens. “Sometimes I think you’re the opposite,” he says, his voice low, rumbling in his chest.

“What do you mean?”

“I wonder if you know how much power and strength you hold over me.” His nose follows the curve of your soft jawline. “It isn’t just your beauty that makes my heart beat like this.”

Steve unwraps your hand from where it caresses the fine, sun-sprite hairs that meet his neck, and he presses your palm against the warmth of his chest. Underneath it, you can feel his pulse, jumping like it's attuned to you.

“This is what you do to me,” he murmurs against your ear, making you shiver despite his heated breath. “You’re the greatest work of art I never made. The kind that belongs in a museum.”

You laugh, but it’s mean, and you never meant to be mean. The guilt sets in when Steve’s eyes, his gorgeous baby blue eyes, are awash in a steely hurt as he searches your face, looking for something that might not be there.

“I’m sorry,” you force yourself to say. “I didn’t mean to laugh.”

“You don’t believe me?”

If Steve is the sun, you’re just existing in his shadow, basking in all the good that he projects and never knowing what to give in return.

Instead of answering, you cup his face in your hands and run your thumbs over his cheekbones, sliding your fingers down his neck like trickling water, then smoothing out the stress, the stiffness, in his shoulders. He loves it when you do this—relaxes into your touch like a big cat, warm and pliant from the light of day.

But he doesn’t relax this time. Steve stares down at you, his gaze far away, like he’s looking through you. Like he’s trying to figure out what you’re thinking.

You hope he never can.

The arm slung around your waist begins to guide you toward the bedroom, and you let him, because if there’s one thing in this life you trust with everything, it’s Steve. Not because he’s Captain America, not because he’s a superhero whose job description is to save the world, and not because he might love you the way you love him. You trust Steve because he’s Steve, he’s safe and secure and soft, and there’s never been a moment where he’s given you a reason to doubt him.

But those words— _you’re the greatest work of art I never made_ —can’t be real.

Steve moves with you until you’re standing in front of the floor-length mirror hanging on your wall, the one he installed for you when he got tired of seeing it balancing precariously on the floor where you left it, and it steals your breath for a moment. To see him standing behind you, nearly a foot taller than you, his body wide and broad and warm and so goddamn beautiful, you think that if a year is all you’ll ever have with him, to touch him, to see him like this, then you’re the luckiest girl alive.

If Steve isn’t the sun, then he’s its God. _Helios_ , you might call him in your dreams where he brightens the night until you feel alive, _I love you and your sun_.

“What do you see?” he asks you, his hands clutching your waist, holding you in place.

“The most beautiful thing in the galaxy,” you tell him. “The man I love more than anything.”

He laughs, pressing a kiss to your neck.

“Me too,” he says. “You’re like the goddamn sun, sweetheart.”

But it makes you frown, and he notices it in the mirror’s reflection. “ _You’re_ the sun,” you say, spinning around to face him, but Steve’s hands lock around your body and he stills you, and once again you’re staring at his eyes through the mirror.

“Do you ever see how beautiful you are?” he asks.

No. He hides his face in your neck and you’re forced to stare at yourself now instead of him.

“Do you know how much light you bring into my life? How cold I feel until you’re in my arms?”

No. You think about the statue, the body of a woman you wish you were the size of.

“Do you know how much I need you to exist?”

No. Steve’s arms wrap around your soft middle and you wonder what he would look like holding a woman who takes up less space, who lets his brilliance shine without weighing him down.

When he looks back up at you, in the mirror, your face is twisted into something ugly. Steve, you suppose, will want to make art out of it, to smooth away the pucker in your lips and the draw of your brows, the way your forehead wrinkles with contempt.

He releases you, stepping away, feet taking him toward his dresser. You are frozen in front of the mirror, eyes roaming over your body, highlighting every insecurity you’ve had since you were young, the ones you always said you’d grow out of.

If Steve isn’t the sun, then you can’t be the moon—you’re just an asteroid floating around in space, lost, dying, crumbling. People don’t look at you and assign a value like beauty to you.

You almost don’t notice when Steve is behind you again, his arms wrapping around you, something colorful in his hands. He places it against your body, cupping it in his arms like a treasure. A gasp leaves your mouth.

It’s a sculpture, like the one he made for Natasha, but it’s different. The breasts are heavy, hanging lower and a little uneven, still beautiful. The stomach isn’t flat but round and the way he’s carved it makes it look soft to touch, bouncy, despite the knowledge that its clay. The hips and shoulders are wider, more familiar, and he’s painted it in shades of blue that match his eyes, match the sky right as the sun is setting and night is moving in, when the moon is coming alive.

But what catches your eye more than anything are the golden stripes of shimmering paint that make up the stretch marks—dangerously similar to the ones that decorate your own body—and how they catch in the light.

It’s rapturously gorgeous.

“You made this?” Your voice is breathy when you ask, your hands trembling, reaching out to touch this beautiful statue, but you just can’t bring yourself to.

Steve hums in agreement. “It’s why Natasha wanted her own.”

“Who—” You swallow thickly. “Who did you make this for?”

If Steve is the sun, you would burn up in his atmosphere, just for a taste of his solar flare when he looks at you the way he is right now, loving and kind and still hungry, like he’ll never get enough of you.

He kisses the skin behind your ear, taking one of your hands in your own to press the sculpture into your grasp. Gently, he folds your fingers over it so you can feel the delicate curves of his art against your skin.

“Can’t you tell?” he asks, his lips drawing a line of fire from your neck to the top of your shoulder. “It’s you, sweetheart.”

No—how could you? This sculpture can’t be you. It’s too beautiful to be you. Even with all its flaws, all the things that should point out that make it less than perfect, it’s art. Steve is an artist. He makes art out of ugly things. He made art out of you, and it’s so fucking stunning, you wonder if maybe his hands could do that to you. Could his hands sculpt your body, your living body, into something better than it is now if you let him touch you enough? Are his hands warm enough with the light of the sun to melt all your imperfections away in the same method he uses to shape clay?

“You made me look so beautiful,” you say, a sob choking your words.

“No,” he says. “I could never make anything as beautiful as you.”

He sweeps you into his arms and kisses you sweetly, then, the sculpture he’s made of you the only thing keeping your bodies apart from one another. You cling to it like you’re afraid to lose it, like if your hands aren’t on it, maybe it will disappear and it’ll have been a dream, the fact that Steve’s made you into art. You’re glad you aren’t art, though. Because if you were art, put up in a museum where he says you belong, then Steve wouldn’t be allowed to touch you so generously, so warmly, so perfectly.

And you let him touch you, hoping to memorize the way he molds your wide hips, the dip of your waist, the curve of your shoulder, as if he is sculpting you all over again.

If Steve isn’t the sun, then he is your Helios, your god, your everything. And if he is your Helios, then perhaps you are the sun after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Come say hi and request pieces like this and other drabbles at @divine-mistake on tumblr!


End file.
